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Mike Pompeo graduated from West Point, served in the U.S. Army and graduated from Harvard Law School.

Before being appointed first to Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Pompeo had been a U.S. representative from Kansas since 2011.

Pompeo on Russia

Pompeo has highlighted Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 presidential campaign and raised concerns that it will target the November midterms.

"I have every expectation that they will continue to try and do that, but I'm confident that America will be able to have a free and fair election [and] that we will push back in a way that is sufficiently robust that the impact they have on our election won't be great," Pompeo told the BBC.

Comments on interrogation and torture

Pompeo criticized the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report in 2014 that found widespread abuses in the CIA’s treatment of war-on-terror prisoners held and interrogated after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“These men and women are not torturers, they are patriots. The programs being used were within the law [and] within the Constitution,” Pompeo said.

Comments on Boston marathon bombing

Pompeo was accused of Islamophobia after he made the following remarks after the deadly 2013 Boston marathon bombing:

"When the most devastating terrorist attacks on America in the last 20 years come overwhelmingly from people of a single faith and are performed in the name of that faith a special obligation falls on those that are the leaders of that faith," he said. "Instead of responding, silence has made these Islamic leaders across America potentially complicit in these acts and, more importantly still, in those that may well follow."

Other policy opinions

Pompeo has been a vocal critic of the Obama administration's nuclear deal with Iran. He has also defended the National Security Agency's bulk data collection program and served on the House Select Benghazi Committee.